


drive

by paperlesscrown



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: College!Bughead, F/M, Fluff, New York!Bughead, jealous!Jughead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-02
Updated: 2019-05-02
Packaged: 2020-02-15 23:41:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18679672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperlesscrown/pseuds/paperlesscrown
Summary: Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Or compels Jughead to drive for three hours every Saturday.





	drive

**Author's Note:**

  * For [oryoucouldstay](https://archiveofourown.org/users/oryoucouldstay/gifts).



> Thank you to Anne, who gave me the prompt for this fic! 
> 
> A short little fic and my first attempt at College!Bughead - please be kind and let me know if you like it!

In their senior year, Jughead and Betty barely spend a night apart.

Without fail, in the middle of the night, he’d hear his window - _her_ window, he still thought - softly slide open, before her telltale footsteps crossed the floor. He’d feel a puff of cold air by his side as she slid onto the bed, and - depending on her mood, or his - she’d either snuggle right into his body and fall asleep, or start kissing him. Or skip that altogether and slip her hand down his boxers.

It’s a regular routine, this nightly ritual of theirs. Snuggling or talk or sex. Sometimes all three. In those hours, he’d desire and revile the future in equal measure. _I want more of this,_ he thinks. _But I never want_ this _night to end._

When she falls asleep (because she always falls asleep first) he tries not to think of the stack of college pamphlets on his desk. Or the neat, tabbed folder of scholarship application forms in her bag. Or the fact that there is no overlap between the two.

_._

_._

_._

When he gets his acceptance letter from Amherst, his father cries. Jughead would confess to Betty (and only Betty) that he did, too - quietly, in the janitor room he once called home. There is a sense of poetic justice to it, he thinks, to having his dream become real in the place where he thought all his dreams had come to die.

Soon after, when Betty is - as predicted - granted a full scholarship to Columbia, they head out to the banks of the Sweetwater, set up camp, and don’t return until four days later. School be damned, they’re bound for college anyway. They bring books from their reading lists and sit up in the tent, back to back, reading them. They cook their own food. They sit with their feet in the water and talk for hours. At night, they make love with passion and defiance and desperation.

Neither of them say it out loud until the second night, afterwards, as they lie naked under the stars. Betty (because of course it had to be his practical, perfect Betty) murmurs under his arm, “What are we gonna do, Jug?”

“About?”

“Amherst. Columbia. They’re not the same college, you know.”

He sighs. “I know.”

She sits up to face him. “So…?”

So? What else could he really say? If he even leaned for one moment out of the optimism that kept him buoyant and sane about their future, he’d go insane. So he mutters nonchalantly, in a tone that does not betray the mild anxiety he feels underneath, “Serial killers, gangs, drug trades, cults - what else have we survived in this town, Betty? It’s a hundred and sixty miles.”

“Three hours away from each other,” she replies sullenly.

“Two and a half,” he corrects. “It’s okay. We’ll be fine.”

.

.

.

But as graduation nears, he begins to panic.

It’s not the first time he sees it happen, but when he accompanies Betty to a campus tour in Columbia, he watches as other guys watch her - their eyes lighting up and zeroing in on the bounce of her ponytail, the way her sweater clings tightly to her curves. He narrows his eyes when some preppy asshole in the same coffee line strikes up a casual conversation with her, then smirks when he saw the guy’s face fall the moment Betty walks back to him. He puts his hand in her ass pocket as they turn and walk away, and she smiles knowingly up at him.

“I know what you’re doing,” she says.

“What?” He feigns shock. “I do this all the time.”

“Right.”

They turn a corner, and she barely has time to gasp before he pushes her up against a wall and crushes his lips against hers. “Goddamn it, Betty,” he breathes into their kiss. “What the hell am I going to do?”

“Every weekend,” she whispers back fiercely, “I need to see you.”

“ _Done_.” He thinks of guys like the coffee line asshole and tightens his grip around her waist, deepening their kiss so he could taste more of her. “And every night.”

“Every _night_?”

“Over FaceTime, Skype, whatever.” He feels desperate, and inhales sharply at the lavender scent of her hair, willing himself to retain the memory. “Jesus. I didn’t think it was gonna be this hard.”

Betty chuckles softly. “I’ve been dreading this since I got the scholarship, Jug - being away from you,” she murmurs. “But you’d been so positive, so supportive…”

“Yeah, well, fuck that guy,” he mutters, pulling her into a tight embrace. “This sucks.”

.

.

.

He’s with her when she moves all her stuff into her dorm room. He glances approvingly at the framed picture of the two of them sitting proudly on her desk. Her roommate had left for the night, and they lie together in the dark, her laptop balancing precariously on his stomach as they watch _Taxi Driver._

Midnight comes. He thinks of the long drive back to Amherst and he feels the distance between them even then, even as she lies warm and soft against him. He counts the hours to their next meeting. 48 until Saturday. Less if he leaves campus right after his last lecture for the week.

He tears himself away from her. She whines. His body protests, but he still has to unpack his stuff. He kisses her and promises to see her that weekend. She sighs and lets him go. Reluctantly.

When he gets into the car, he turns on the radio. Incubus is on.

 _To see you when I wake up is a gift I didn’t think could be real,_ Brandon Boyd croons. _To know that you feel the same is a three-fold utopian dream._

The cheap coincidence of the lyrics pisses him off. “This is bullshit,” he grumbles, turning it off.

.

.

.

_Every night._

They exchange their timetables. Sometimes, they finish class around the same time - other times, he has Philosophy 101 in the afternoon, or she has business with the _Bronx Beat_ , Columbia University’s student paper.

But they always manage. If not hours, then at least a few minutes. Sometimes they fight, because the distance gets to them more than they let on. Sometimes the physical need is too much and they learn their way around the intricate intimacies of FaceTime, the value of dirty talk and nude pictures (he’s a gentleman and always deletes right after; she likes to hang on to his until he _makes_ her delete them).

Sometimes neither one of them wants to hang up, and they fall asleep over the phone, and neither of them realise until the sunshine streams in to their rooms, waking them up to another day.

.

.

.

Jughead drives to Columbia every weekend, runs the stairs up to her room and knocks twice before listening carefully, to see if her roommate responds. All too often she isn’t - the roommate is a sorority rushee who’s rarely home, so he goes ahead and lets himself in. Sometimes, he comes in while Betty’s in the middle of an inspired bout of essay-writing, and he would sit and wait. Sometimes, she already has a movie playing on her laptop, with a bowl of popcorn fresh from the microwave.

Sometimes, the curtains are closed, and the fairy lights he gave her for Christmas are the only light in the room, and she’s clothed in nothing but his flannel shirt and black lace.

On those weekends, they don’t emerge from her room unless they absolutely _have_ to.

.

.

.

On one rare weekend when she doesn’t have to stay back and work her Brooklyn barista job, Betty drives down to Amherst.

Everyone turns to look curiously at her as she walks down the hall to his room. It’s not just that she’s new - she’s particularly luminous that day, with her hair tousled and out, and her shoulders bared by her tiny shrift of a sundress. He smirks. _She’s doing this on purpose,_ he thinks.

“The girlfriend’s real!” his dumbass roommate yells down the hall as Jughead pulls her in for a kiss. “You owe me twenty bucks, Todd!”

.

.

.

“What if… what if I’m sick of this?”

“Of what?”

“Four years of driving back and forth, you in New York, me in--”

“Oh my god, Jug, are you breaking up with me?! _One day before graduation?!_ ”

Jughead sighs and laughs at the absurd turn of the situation. _Well, that speech was a dumb idea._ He reaches into his pocket and takes it out - the little square box he’d been carrying around for a year, purchased after years of scrimping and saving.

Betty stares blankly at him. Stays frozen to the spot even when he gets down on one knee. A gasp alerts everyone else in Columbia’s Butler Library. All eyes turn to them, but he doesn’t care, _he doesn’t care._

“I’m done driving,” he says. “Come home with me, Betty Cooper.”

.

.

.

Betty throws her graduation cap in the air like everyone else, but doesn’t stay to catch it.

When it hits the ground, she’s already taken off running to the edge of the field.

Jughead had picked up her stuff earlier. He smiles as she runs towards him, her ring sparkling in the sun. He laughs when she kicks off her heels to run faster. Somewhere in the distance, he thinks he spots the wavy blonde hair of Alice Cooper, who had begged him and begged him to tell her daughter to contact her. He'd hung up. 

Betty leaps into his arms and presses up against him, black gown and all. They kiss passionately, with the intensity and relief of _at last, at last._

He looks at his wristwatch over her shoulder. “Alright. We gotta go. Mine’s in three hours,” he laughs.

“You better drive fast then,” she says. “I wouldn’t wanna miss it.”

His hand clasps hers as they drive. It’s a far cry from lonely cups of coffee and Incubus on the radio. From FaceTime dates and occasional handwritten letters. From high school and milkshakes and Pop's and Riverdale. 

But it’s home for now. She's here after all. As the New York skyline recedes, he stares out into the horizon, and so does she. It’s empty. Blank and bright and ready to be written anew.

**Author's Note:**

> I've always imagined Jughead going to a small liberal arts college while Betty went to an Ivy League school. Amherst and Columbia felt like the most natural choices - they're also referred to in "The Christmas Letters", another Bughead fic I wrote!
> 
> The song referred to here is Incubus' "I Miss You". It's gorgeous. Give it a listen!


End file.
